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Over the last several decades, Big Business associations, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have become far more active in federal litigation. Agency regulators now anticipate a lawsuit from a trade association when they issue major regulations. And trade associations led by the Chamber regularly file amicus briefs. Those briefs make legal arguments; they also serve to signal to judges what the Chamber and other trade associations believe to be important.

For this report, we identified cases that came before Judge Kavanaugh and in which the Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), or the American Petroleum Institute (API) participated as a party or amicus curiae.

To compile the list of relevant cases, we did Westlaw and Bloomberg searches for D.C. Circuit decisions where Judge Kavanaugh sat on the panel or that were heard en banc, and that included “Chamber of Commerce” or “National Association of Manufacturers” or “American Petroleum Institute.” We assessed whether Judge Kavanaugh sided for or against the business group.

Our findings: In 25 of the 33 cases (76%) we found that were relevant to this inquiry, Judge Kavanaugh sided with the position advanced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers or American Petroleum Institute. In 8 cases (24%), he ruled against the position of the business group.[1]

[1] Cases from our searches not included in this tally were primarily cases in which the groups appeared in the court’s opinion in a case citation. In addition, in Seven-Sky v. Holder, 661 F.3d 1 (D.C. Cir. 2011), the Chamber appeared as amicus in support of neither party arguing that if the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate was unlawful, then the court should strike down the entire Act because the mandate was not severable. The court held that the individual mandate was within Congress’s power. Judge Kavanaugh dissented on jurisdictional grounds, arguing that the Anti-Injunction Act barred the suit, and did not weigh in on the merits.

[2] In this case, Judge Kavanaugh agreed with two of the three arguments advanced by API.